SharePoint ships without two things most organizations expect: a real staff directory, and a calendar that behaves like a calendar. Cloudwell’s Staff Directory and Calendar Overlay fix exactly those gaps, and the reviews are now in. Both apps sit at five stars on Microsoft Marketplace, backed up by one of the most respected independent voices in the SharePoint world.
We could tell you our apps are good. Every vendor says that. More useful is what the people running them in production say, and what they say is consistent: these apps solve a real problem, they install in minutes, and the support behind them is fast.
Here’s the roundup.
Calendar Overlay: making SharePoint's calendar behave like a calendar
SharePoint’s native calendar is really a list with some date fields, and it doesn’t behave the way anyone expects a calendar to behave. Calendar Overlay sits on top of that and turns it into the real thing: a proper calendar that pulls SharePoint, Outlook, Planner, and other feeds such as iCal into a single view, inside both SharePoint and Teams.
The reviews get specific about what that unlocks.
One customer uses it to view eight separate calendars at once to check room availability.
Another books Exchange resource rooms directly from the overlay, without leaving SharePoint or Teams.
Doug Johnston had spent weeks fighting SharePoint to integrate an iCal feed from his HRIS; the app did it for him, and he rates it not just “one of the best calendar apps for SharePoint, but one of the best apps he’s used, period”.
Aaron Hamilton, who compared it against alternatives before buying, chose it for being “easy to deploy, easy to administer, and easy for any content creator to drop onto a page”.
Several reviewers single out the value.
We purchased Cloudwell Calendar Overlay to help with reserving conference rooms and it works great. The setup and support was awesome and the support team continues to give great support. – Betty Burchett
Belyk Ecely calls it “excellent and inexpensive”.
Daron Pitts, who bought it as the very first app his team ever purchased for SharePoint and Teams, notes that we keep shipping updates that make it better.
And for teams that need more, our optional self-service event registration service came up too: a capability one customer had been hunting for over a long time, and finally had.
Staff Directory: the org chart SharePoint doesn't give you out of the box
Most intranet owners want an employee directory, and SharePoint doesn’t provide one. The data is all there in Microsoft 365. It just isn’t surfaced in a way users can browse, filter, or search the way they’d expect.
Staff Directory turns that data into a full-page directory, with filtering by department, manager, and other attributes, plus the nice-to-haves like service anniversaries and birthdays.
Two things come up again and again in the reviews: speed and simplicity. One customer had a full directory running with the exact filters they wanted within minutes of installing it, and reports their HR team is glad to be rid of the manual updates their old solution demanded.
Another was up and running in a couple of minutes, and highlights a detail that matters in practice: how easy it was to refine the results to show only real people, filtering out the service and system accounts that clutter most directories.
An independent take on both apps
Susan Hanley is one of the most trusted independent authorities on SharePoint and intranets. She recommends both apps to her own clients, and only when they’re the right fit. Here’s what she told us, in her own words.
On Staff Directory:
“Most intranet product owners want to offer an employee directory as part of their solution. They want one that surfaces the org chart in a variety of ways and allows users to easily find and filter for people based on their department or manager or other attribute. And they want to showcase service anniversaries and sometimes, birthdays. All the data is available, but it’s just not something that is part of SharePoint out of the box.”
On Calendar Overlay:
“SharePoint’s native calendar is, functionally, a list with some additional capability. It does not behave the way users expect a calendar to behave. Cloudwell has built on top of that to make it act like a real calendar, and to overlay multiple calendars so you can view them together in one place.
Not every organization needs this, but when you need it, building it yourself is painful. They have productized something that many organizations want. That is exactly the right instinct.”
That’s the honest version, and it’s the one worth trusting. If you don’t need it, you don’t need it. If you do, you’ll know it, and you’ll save yourself the build.
What every five-star review has in common
Read the reviews end to end and the same three things surface, whichever app they’re about.
☑️ Minutes, not projects. Install, configure, done. Reviewers keep reaching for the same phrase: up and running in a couple of minutes.
☑️ Support that shows up. Becky Sanchez set up a meeting with Chris, our CTO, who walked her through how the app worked and helped her get it purchased, all in ten minutes. That pattern repeats across both listings.
☑️ A real problem, properly solved. Nobody is praising features for the sake of it. They’re describing a job that SharePoint made hard, and an app that made it easy.
A few questions our buyers ask
Will Calendar Overlay work across both SharePoint and Teams?
Yes. It runs in both, and reviewers use it in both, including for booking Exchange resource rooms directly from the overlay.
Can Staff Directory filter out non-human accounts?
Yes. Customers specifically call out how straightforward it is to refine the directory to show only real people, leaving system and service accounts out.
Do I need Calendar Overlay if my organization only manages one or two calendars?
Maybe not, and we’d rather tell you that. As Susan Hanley puts it, not every organization needs it. The value shows up when you’re juggling multiple calendars, resource rooms, or feeds from outside SharePoint.
How do I actually get these apps?
The fastest route is a short conversation. Several reviewers were up and running within ten minutes of talking to us. Start on the product pages for Calendar Overlay and Staff Directory, or get in touch and we’ll show you either one in a quick demo.